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Tag Archives: VMWorld

If you want to check out the new vRealize Operations Manager 6.1 or vSphere with Operations Management (vSOM) or LogInisght v3.0, come and visit my colleagues and me at the VMware booth in the Solutions Exchange at VMworld Barcelona !

This year I am not working in the Hands-On Labs at VMworld, unfortunately I got too busy in my local job. But I will be there presenting on vRealize Log Insight and what it can mean for your business. To this end I will tell you the story of our customer Milcobel and how they implemented our log analyser and what unique advantages they get from our product.

I am excited that I am presenting with Tom Findling. He is staff engineer and product owner of Operations Manager. The coolest title in engineering if you ask me.

Like last year I am organising a VBC on Cloud Operations during VMworld Europe in Barcelona next week. If you are a VMware customer in the Benelux area and you have questions on vRealize Operations Manager (the artist formerly known as vCenter Operations Manager) or Log Insight come and visit us ! We will be running an open format with questions and some presentations on what is to come. Jon Herlocker, CTO Log Insight & vRealize Operatons Manager, and Eran Carmel, Sr Product Manager will be there to inform you.

Please check for more details and free registration at this EventBrite event. Please note that this is not a session in the catalogue. We run an open format, you do not need experience. I will check entries against our CRM system and kick out anyone who does not qualify…

Also this year I decided to organize a Hands-On Labs behind the scenes tour for Benelux customers. This is a unique opportunity to see how we manage this great event with our own tools. Deploying 15000 VMs at the US session ! The visit is scheduled on Thursday morning, so that on the last day of the conference you can have an easy start after the party… Register on Eventbrite.

Hope to see you in Barcelona ! And if you have not registered yet, click the VMworld logo above… There is still time, cheap flights and AirBnB rooms…

The VMWorld session catalogue is now online, start reading and choosing talks and presentations you want to see . The good news is also that the session Bill Roth and I proposed about a Belgian use case for Log Insight has been accepted for Barcelona. So come and see how the customer found unique value in our log file analyser in this session:

Our great technical conference VMworld EMEA is on it’s way to Barcelona ! In two weeks we will be running our feet off in the Fira Gran Via. If you have no idea yet why you should attend, you can watch an overview video here:

In this post I also want to give you an overview of sessions and labs related to cloud provisioning and management to help you fill your agenda 😉

Sessions:

I cannot list all of them and do not know all the speakers, but here are my recommendations. You can consult the complete list here.

Wednesday:

VCM5271 – VMware and Puppet: How to Plan, Deploy & Manage Modern Applications. I attended this session in SF. Becky and Nigel do a superb job of explaining what we are doing with Puppet and do great demos. Don’t miss !

VCM5811 – How to Manage vSphere and Hybrid Cloud with vCenter Operations Management.

VCM5009 – Practical Real World Reporting with vCenter Operations. This is what we keep explaining to customers. Tom Findling is now the product owner of vCOps…

Thursday:

VCM5148 – Provisioning and Managing a Heterogeneous Cloud with vCloud Automation Center. Naomi is the product manager for vCAC and Zack is extremely knowledgeable. He created some great demos.

VCM5781 – Whats New and What’s Next in vCenter Operations: A Tech Preview. Jai is Director, cloud management products, if anyone can tell you what is coming in vCOps…

VCM4952 – Practicing What We Preach: VMware IT on vCenter Operations Management Suite and vCloud Automation Center. Yes, we use vCAC and vCOps internally, come see us eat our own dog food.

Hands-On Labs:

Of course we are back this year with the Hands-on Labs where you can come and learn in a real-life environment. For each lab a complete environment is deployed on-the-fly in a vCloud Director environment, so that you can actually use a real product. You can use thin clients or bring your own device (even a tablet !). New this year is a hotspot where you can take labs with your own laptop, I think in Barcelona it will be in Hall 8. The HOL itself is in Hall 7.

Even better you can take a lot of labs just from the comfort of your home… Nine labs have already been added from the new labs. See the announcement on the blog. You can enroll in the lab I am lab captain for here.

I think the greatest way to learn at any show is to visit the solutions exchange or whatever name it goes by. At VMWorld vendors have a high technical level of content at their booths and good demos. Nowhere can you learn so much on such a small space (‘small’ is relative here my feet tell me).

Monday night and Tuesday morning I visited. Surprised at the amount of swag being given away, I hope US Airways will understand I had to gather stuff for my unfortunate colleagues at home…. Some observations:

PuppetLabs are just a great bunch. They are very enthusiastic, I went to their session this morning and very impressed. This warrants a separate post. They must have bought a t-shirt factory….

I was impressed by a demo from Simplivity. As I understand it, they make appliances that run vSphere virtual machines of course and integrate into vCenter. But they have backup software integrated that seems very fast. Connect two and you can backup or migrate to the other machine and with more machines you can buid a federation. You can also backup to a cloud provider like Amazon and encrypt your data on the fly. Deduplication of data is done inline. And aparently they already have some big client names, also in Europe. Very impressive.

Of course you need to go over to the VMware booth, even if it is to share the extremely painful carpet experience on your feet, and have a look at new things coming, especially vCAC 6.

Meanwhile I am runing around with my self-printed stickers, The QR code links to this blog…

It is not easy blogging about the conference while you are working in the Hands-on Labs, so here are a few updates and thoughts so far….

The labs are going well, we passed the mile stone of 6000 labs served this afternoon… It is still incredible, compared to a few years ago – or to other vendors now – what we can achieve: balance over two data enters, create and destroy thousands of VM to create the learning environments…. Of course the people in the NOC monitor everything using our own tools, they created some very cool custom dashboards for vCOps. I think we need to publish a white paper on how we did that.

Monday I took a lunch time run on Embarcadero to clear my mind and exercise a bit, also gave me an opportunity to shop for a new yacht… And was reminded of old times when I saw Larry’s pavilion for the America’s cup race starting soon.

Monday night I organized a Benelux Beer Bash, as you could discover on these pages.

I was hoping for a big turnout, but only 7 people made it. Still we had a very good time at 21st Amendment, they have some great beers they brew and the food is excellent and a good atmosphere !

For everyone from the Benelux attending VMWorld US in San Francisco (if you do not know where the Benelux is, don’t bother…) we are organizing a beer bash on Monday night, August 26 at 8 pm. The location of choice is 21st Amendment on 2nd Street. Description and address is here on yelp. It is a 15 min walk from Moscone South. Google Maps link.

It is a brewery, so we will try some of the local beers on tap and have some appetizers. You can find us on the mezzanine level or outside if the weather is nice. Look for the guy in the yellow Hands-on Labs shirt….

It will be a great way to meet at the start of the conference and get to know each other and we can discuss the day’s keynote (if there are any announcements, I am not saying there will be).

Please ping me at ageenrits(at)vmware(dot)com or @alaingeenrits on Twitter if you are stopping by, I will tell you the password.